


no more a sleepless night

by tayttimus



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Hand Jobs, Isolation, M/M, Minor Character Death, Mutual Masturbation, Sharing a Bed, Strangers to Lovers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-28
Updated: 2020-09-28
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:08:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,340
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26691169
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tayttimus/pseuds/tayttimus
Summary: In a world that sleeps itself away night by night, Dejun assumes he is the only one left who can remain awake.Mark shatters that belief instantly.
Relationships: Mark Lee/Xiao De Jun | Xiao Jun
Comments: 11
Kudos: 102





	no more a sleepless night

**Author's Note:**

> this fic is the byproduct of two things. 1) [anne](http://www.twitter.com/speckledsolana) invited me to join others in celebrating the halfway point between xiaojun and mark's birthdays with xiaomark fics, and 2) i briefly scrolled past a "concepts bot" tweet that said something about "a city that oversleeps" and then promptly could not find it again. as it is now nearly october, really only one of those things still actively applies, but i think its nice to know where the inspiration came from.
> 
> many many thanks and praise go to that very same anne for helping me wrangle this beast into what it ended up becoming. without their brain to pick and their insightful edits, im not sure this fic would see the light of day nor be half as well put together. anne, you inspire and uplift me.
> 
> enjoy~

The city is asleep. Of course it’s asleep. It’s hardly ever awake.

Dejun isn’t sure when it started. It’s always been like this. The sun sets and the world falls asleep, it rises again, and the world stays asleep, and only after it’s reached its peak does the world wake to greet it, have their six hours in its rays, before returning to their slumber.

Except for him.

For as long as he can remember, he’s been one to wake up early, stay out late, fear the slumber that calls to him so sweetly. His mother would stay up with him, when he was younger, fighting back yawns and setting alarms. 

“Don’t fall asleep like me, _baobao_ ,” she would whisper to him, pinching his arms with what energy she had. 

“This is how you make yourself food,” she would say, firmly, as even the six hours she once had of mental clarity dwindled further into a sleepy fog.

“Watch closely, _baobei_ , I need to know you can wrap up a scrape like this if I’m asleep,” she’d demand, around a yawn, her fingers so much less dexterous than when they would tie his sneakers as a child.

“Don’t let the sleep take you, _xingan baobei_ ,” she begged, her eyes barely open, as she fell asleep for the last time.

The world—at least, so Dejun assumes, having never left the boundaries of the city—now conducts its business in the six hours a day that the world is awake, everything else falling prey to a deep and dreamless sleep that eats away at the body slowly. Really, Dejun’s not sure how many people are aware that the sleep is dangerous, but the evidence is in this morning, this early hour of 10 a.m., devoid of life beyond him, the birds, and the swaying of the trees in the morning breeze.

The sun greets the day, and Dejun watches it creep along the greenery that surrounds his apartment complex from its roof, his legs kicking the side of the building where he sits on the edge. His mother passed from the sleep five years ago, and since then he hadn’t seen another soul outside of the times the world awoke. The other eighteen hours of the day are lonely, sure, but when he’s walking the streets to grab groceries or necessities for the apartment, doing odd jobs for the aunties in his building to earn what little cash he might need for food and sundries, or sitting on the roof like this and watching the city gradually lose its bustle by 6 p.m., he wonders how much longer any of these people have. Whether the uncle at the convenience store is going to wake up the next day, or if the little sister down the hall will still have her mother come noon.

Five years of this has been fine, for Dejun. His mother was all he had, before, and she was sure to prepare him for a life without her. He doesn’t long for much. Just hopes to avoid oversleeping, and get by as best he could. It isn’t his job to worry about anyone, it isn’t his job to save anyone.

He yawns, pinches the skin of his arm between his nails, and gets down from the ledge. He has two hours before the world wakes up, and there are tasks to be done.

_It happened quickly. The hour ticked over, and the populace fell over where they stood. Loss was great that first day, as it was unexpected. It took months for the world to adjust to its new norm. Laws were made and passed and businesses adapted._

_There was no one to monitor the sleeping hours, so it quickly becomes nature to pretend the sleeping hours simply do not occur. A mother meets a business man in the grocery store and they converse only briefly so that their tasks may get done in the time they have. They mention the day, they mention what they’ve done with their waking hours, and they mention absolutely nothing else._

_There is little time to catch up on world affairs. There is little opportunity to report them. If officials still made statements regarding broader society, they would claim no one wakes in the night. They would even believe it to be true._

_The idea of this extended sleep not being universal in its scope is completely taboo to the general public. Unspoken trust is upheld between the sleepers and anyone who might be awake in the late hours of the night. It is the elephant in the room. It is too much to comprehend. For society to continue in the six hours a day it has, society must cease to exist in the eighteen it spends asleep._

_People who walk in the night and the early morning are the boogey man whispered about before the sleep takes._

He takes out the trash, gathers his grocery list and his list of neighbours to hit up for odd jobs to make some cash, and makes a trip down to the pharmacy to get some more caffeine pills, a few six-packs of energy drinks, and to restock some of the supplies he used up from his first aid kit. With the extra time he has, he sits on a bench at the nearby park and watches people bustle through. 

None of them pay him any mind. In a world where six hours is all you get to work with for the day, paying attention to others becomes secondary. There’s no stopping to people-watch, there’s no thought spared for the common man. They need to get where you're going, do what they're doing, and get themselves home. No sense in staying out to fall asleep standing up somewhere, sitting at the doctor’s office, behind the wheel of their car. Everything is a walk away, now. Any more than that is not just a risk, but a bother. Energy must be conserved.

Dejun watches, though. The park is interesting. The older kids watch after the younger ones, while all of their parents do what needs to be done with what time they have. The children have no concept of this being strange. Dejun knows because he was one of them. But he also knows that none of these children have been given the blessing his mother gave.

A girl on the monkey bars swings. The older kids scold her, but she swings regardless. The younger kids get bored of her swinging; they move on. The older kids take off after their juniors. Still, the girl swings. She’s trying to reach that next bar, but it seems just a reach too far. She’s gearing herself up to stretch for it, hyping herself up to grasp it.

She swings. She reaches. The hand that grasps falls short. The hand that holds grows weak.

She falls.

It’s not far to fall, but she flails back for the landing she leaped off of to grasp that first monkey bar. The metal of the structure is bent from overuse, the edge harsh only underneath, but it catches on her shin and drags at the first layer of skin. The scrape is long, but not deep, the fall harsh, but not awful.

She hitches a breath, and wails.

Before he knows what he’s doing, Dejun is in front of her, his backpack drawn around to his front, zipper pulled aside so he can reach his first aid kit tucked away at the bottom. “That was silly, little sister,” he says chidingly.

She only cries harder, shaking her head and rocking back and forth. Dejun pulls out some gauze, a water bottle, and wets the bandage to clean the scrape. The little girl yanks her shin out of his grasp. “ _Oppa_ , it hurts!” she cries in Korean, protecting the injury from his further prodding.

Dejun switches tongues. “Listen here, little one,” he encourages in her language. “Look here, little sister, this is antiseptic. This takes the dirt out and keeps the skin from hurting more in the future.” His tone is calm and coaxing, and he hears her sniffles begin to ease out. “You take this and put it on something that won’t leave little pieces on you.”

She watches his hands warily as he uses an antiseptic wipe to clean her shin. The other children are watching with poorly-disguised interest. Dejun raises his voice slightly. “You know it’s clean when the place where the skin is wet runs clear. That’s when you put the bandage on. Do you know how to put an adhesive bandage on, little one?”

The girl turtles in on herself, sniffing once, and shakes her head. One of the boys who’s gathered around pipes up. “ _Hyung_ , I know! You have to make sure you don’t touch the cotton bit, and pull the tabs that cover the sticky parts out like butterfly wings!”

“Right answer, little brother,” Dejun says with a grin. “But your scrape here, little blossom, it’s too big for one of those adhesive bandages. So we have to use something a little bigger. Come round, fishes,” he beckons, easing back a bit to give his small audience a better view. “See how I cut the gauze?”

He’s detailed. He’s thorough. He tapes the gauze down and shows the gathered children how to change the dressing, what signs to watch for in case of infection, what medications to look for in the drugstore. He replicates his mother’s lessons in their entirety, truncated to condense the information so that there might not be an issue if he has to leave suddenly. Luckily, it’s still before the halfway-mark of the waking hours, so the children’s parents are likely still tied up with their obligations.

“ _Oppa_ ,” says an older girl, neatly tucking her dirty-edged skirt around her knees, “you know a lot, huh?”

Dejun packs his kit back up, tucking it into his backpack once more. “I know a bit, but I’m always learning more.”

“Did your mom and dad teach you?”

Dejun looks at her askance, casting his gaze back to the playground where the other children are back to playing as if nothing had happened. “Yeah, my mom taught me. She was a very smart woman. I think you could grow into a woman as smart as her.”

She picks at a loose thread in her shirt, twisting it tight around her finger, the skin puffing out around it. “Did something happen to her? You sound sad talking about her.”

“Mm,” Dejun hedges, his hands still in zipping his pack back up. “Yeah. She’s not around anymore. But she taught me well so that I could live a good life without her if I needed to.”

“Did your mom...did she talk to you about bedtime?”

The question sends ice down his veins, lights a fire in his heart. “What do you mean?”

This girl looks him straight in the eye, her gaze like a vice grip on him. “I don’t want to sleep as long as we do, _oppa_.”

She sounds scared, frightened and alone, and he wonders if her parents have done anything half as carefully as his mother did. He reaches out carefully and tucks her hair behind her ear, cupping the back of her head gently. “Hang onto that, little sister. For as long as you can, hang on to wakefulness. Don’t oversleep, and learn how to do the things you can’t do without your parents.”

“Is that what you did?”

Dejun stands, hefts his backpack over his shoulder, and offers her a wrapped candy out of one of the backpack’s side pockets. “I’m just dreaming, little sister. Watch out for the other little sister with everyone else, okay?”

With a quick nod, she pops the candy in her mouth, and stands up to dust off her skirt. “Thank you for answering my questions, _oppa_. I’ll look after the other kids.” She says it with conviction, with shaking little fists and determination in her gaze, before she turns and runs back to the playground.

The kids are on his mind when sleep takes everyone later that evening. He wonders if he did right by them, if he taught them well enough, if they’ll retain the information and be able to survive if their parents sleep the final sleep sooner rather than later. 

_There is a dream that haunts Dejun for the few hours he does find sleep._

_There is nothing truly frightening about it. There is no spectre of fear that hounds him, no angel of death that sings sweetly to him of his end. He knows what there is to fear in this world, and he knows that his end is unavoidable and inescapable. These things are not what haunt him._

_Instead, the dream goes like this:_

_He stands upon the precipice of a building. It is not the apartment he grew up with his mother in, and it is none of the rooftops he came to know in the hours after midnight when she died. It is unfamiliar to him, but comforting for how he looks down and can barely distinguish the cars parked among the street._

_The wind caresses him and soothes him, the sun kisses the tops of his cheekbones, the world is spread wide and open before him without interruption. He feels free and light and weightless, like he could step out into the open air and walk upon it like stairs to climb ever higher._

_But a voice calls behind him, and he doesn’t know it, but it settles into his bones like a familiar song. “Step back, come back,” it beckons, and Dejun wants to turn around to face it, can hardly resist its command. “Return to me, my love.”_

_And then, from in front of him, where there is nowhere to stand and where nothing before stood, two hands squish his cheeks together. “Don’t listen,” says the owner of the hands, eyes molten and fierce. “I won’t let you go, darling.”_

_And he wakes, and he doesn’t know which voice to heed._

The streets are littered with stalled vehicles, optimistic fools hoping to fight sleep long enough to make it to their destination and failing. It’s a strange sight that’s become familiar, even comforting. These hours are those when Dejun knows he’s truly on his own, that his life is his to do with as he chooses, and that no one is awake to judge him. From his apartment window, he observes the streets empty of passersby but for the odd body sleeping in the bus shelter, tucked under the entryway of a building, collapsed beneath a tree.

When the night is torn open by the raucous engine of some high-end sports car, Dejun nearly startles out his window. 

There’s no way that a car should be driving at this hour. Who could there be to drive it? Everyone ought to be asleep, at the wheel or in other locations, so how could a car be driving in the middle of the night?

It’s noisy, echoing off the walls of the apartment buildings in Dejun’s area, loud enough that it must be near. It ricochets in Dejun’s ears, like he’s hearing one car and a hundred cars all at once, and he realizes that he’s feeling dizzy. He’s been holding his breath, listening to this engine pulse like the beat of his heart in his chest that is faster than it ought to be. _How is there a car driving right now?_

It backfires—a great echoing, resounding shot of powerful sound—and like the starting gunshot of a 100 metre dash Dejun is out the door of his apartment, jumping over the railings of the emergency stairwell to get down from his sixth floor faster. The engine sounded far initially, but the backfire sounded closer, and the subsequent rev of the engine closer still.

_Please_ , Dejun thinks, frantic, desperate, careening out through the front doors of his apartment complex, _please wait, don’t go yet, please let me find you._

It comes around the corner, a sleek black thing, unidentifiable in make to Dejun’s untrained eye. He’s so stupefied by it screeching down his street that he can’t even push his body to do anything beyond staring at it, watching it pass.

Winding through parked cars, the driver leaves Dejun standing in their dust cloud. 

He stares after it, feeling something deep and heavy sink in his stomach. 

He wheels backward, not turning, just stepping in reverse until his back hits the unforgiving concrete of his apartment complex. He tips his head back, a dull _thunk_ of his head hitting the wall, and slides down its surface as his legs give out.

Five years. Five years he’s fought to stay awake in the evening, alone. And the first time he’s seen someone else awake—not just sleepwalking or sleeping with their eyes open, but awake enough to operate a motor vehicle at those speeds—they tear into and out of his life like wax paper. Five years of hoping he isn’t doomed to six sole hours of socialization with people who are barely even awake in the first place.

He breaks. A sob escapes him and he lets the tears welling in his eyes fall. No longer do these hours of sleep feel freeing to Dejun who is awake. He’d grown complacent and hadn’t even noticed. It feels like the first real failure since his mother fluttering her eyes closed to sleep that one last time, since he sobbed into her chest with his fingers pressed below her jaw to feel the beating of her heart peter out and stop. What could he have done then, what could he do now? He’s powerless to change his position, to fight against this fate, and it hurts.

Time passes, and he doesn’t move from the front of the building. At some small hour of the morning, he falls asleep with his cheek squished against his shoulder.

A hand on his shoulder wakes him. “Come on, dude...I know it was you...Man, don’t make this a waste of my time, seriously...”

Dejun expects to open his eyes to the harsh light of day, to have slept like he never should have and some poor person has stumbled upon him when the sleep has released them. He does not expect the dim light of dawn and a halo of light growing behind the head of someone near-enough his age who’s bent down to shake him awake. It’s jarring like nothing else can be to see someone’s face in motion at six in the morning after five years of nothing outside of daylight hours. “Was it you?” this fresh-faced kid asks him, seeming just as shocked by Dejun as Dejun is by him.

“I’m sorry?” Dejun asks, not processing that he’s being spoken to in Korean, responding instead in Mandarin.

The moment stands between them as if the air has hung still, and Dejun imagines for a moment that he could place a single cherry blossom petal in the direct middle point from their noses and it would sit where he left it without trouble. Dejun can’t keep himself from searching this boy’s face like it holds the key to everything, and maybe it does. Or else, the answers are held on his, from how the sharp, dark eyes search the planes of Dejun’s own face in kind.

“You’re awake,” says the boy, softly, as though to himself. And Dejun hasn’t as yet given him cause to believe he’s being spoken to and understanding.

“I’m awake,” Dejun offers in Korean, and when he speaks he realizes his heart is racing and his breath is coming shallowly. “And so are you.”

“Oh my god,” he mutters, and that’s in English, and Dejun still hasn’t looked away from his eyes and how they catch every ray of light from the rising sun. “M-my name’s Mark!” offers this boy suddenly, eager and unable to hold it back. “I...I can’t believe it. Like I really can’t believe it, I was on the goddamn highway by the time I realized that like, no, that wasn’t someone sleeping standing up, that guy was awake, and—shit, how long have you—”

Dejun pushes up off the ground, accidentally crowding Mark’s space and cutting off his frantic explanation, but he hardly steps back to accommodate him, and—are his eyes amber? Are they a molten gold that catches the light of the sun, or is Dejun going loopy with the rush of dopamine he’s getting from knowing he’s not the only one awake for the first time in his life? “Why are you here?” Dejun asks, doing his mother’s memory a disservice by being as rude as he could be, but absolutely lacking the mental faculties to do anything other than give voice to the thoughts that leap to his tongue first. “I’ve never seen you around, you don’t look familiar, I would have noticed someone else awake—”

“Oh, dude, no, I’m not from around here, I—” Mark turns around and gestures to that same sleek black thing that Dejun had watched screech into and out of his life in the blink of an eye; or so he thought. “I’m...I’ve been looking for you!” Mark confesses, and when Dejun spooks out of his space and puts a foot or more of distance between them, Mark smacks a hand to his forehead. “No, no I—hold up, that’s...t-that’s not what I meant—” he huffs out a frustrated breath, “God, I was _not_ expecting to find someone today, honestly, I’m fucking this all up—”

The sun is rising further, longer shadows creeping smaller and smaller, awash with a crimson gold that fades yellower with each passing moment. Mark’s halo of black hair broadens when he runs his hands through it in exasperation, then slaps them against his thighs. He’s in so much motion that Dejun can’t truly process it, this much activity so early in the day in a city that is oversleeping its life away.

Mark offers a hand. “My name is Mark, I come from the northern edge of the city, and I’ve been looking for people like us to see if there’s any...cause or connection to the sleep that no one else can escape from. And...you are?”

Something wells up in Dejun’s throat, and he takes Mark’s hand to shake reverently, slowly, as tears brim in his eyes and threaten to fall. “I’m Dejun. A-and I never once thought about finding anyone else that could stay awake, because...” He swallows, and he grips Mark’s hand tighter, staring at where Mark has started rubbing his thumb along the back of Dejun’s hand. It seems almost subconscious. _Because losing anyone more would be too much_. “I don’t know. I just...never thought about it. It was too much work just keeping myself awake.”

Mark tugs on their joined hands, drawing Dejun into his embrace and wrapping him up in a way he really hasn’t been since his mother passed. “I’ll keep you awake, if you’ll join me. If you’ll let me. I don’t want to let anyone else go, I don’t want them to live like we’ve had to.” He seems to realize what he’s done, and steps away hastily. Dejun aches for the touch once it’s gone. “Sorry, uh...” he stammers, “I mean, you know... if you’re looking for company. I’m looking for more.”

“More?” Dejun asks.

He’s tugged toward the car, and Mark opens the passenger side for him. “Yeah. I...I lucked out, in the scheme of things. My neighbour’s kid could resist the pull too. He’s...Well, he’s a handful, but you know how parents get about the sleep, right? So we really only found out maybe six or seven years ago—”

Dejun watches Mark walk around the front end of the car and slip into the driver’s seat. “Hold on, what do you mean? How do parents ‘get’?”

Mark eyes him, then starts the car and pulls away from the curb, weaving through stalled cars in the street. “You know, like...Making sure you’re asleep before them, locking all the doors before they sleep, not like...thinking about the possibility of you not sleeping like they do.” Mark’s hands twist on the steering wheel. “I was twelve the first time I saw the world asleep. My friend was fifteen.”

“Seriously?” Dejun asks, incredulous, thinking of his mother’s careful instruction on what to do and not do while she slept. _A-jun, please be careful if you’re going out after dark! Promise Mama, I’ll worry myself to death if I wake up and you’re not safe._

“Did yours not?”

Dejun swallows, and shakes his head. “It was just me and Ma, and she—” Dejun stops himself, a dam near to bursting inside of him. A drop of water more and he will flood, all his thoughts and past and feelings spilling over and...perhaps there’s only so much water that can be doused over new ground. A car is too close a space to unload even half the thoughts that rattle unspoken in Dejun’s mind. “She taught me everything I know,” Dejun says instead, swallowing the overshare that hangs off his tongue. “You know, she made sure I could take care of myself.”

“Bro, really?” Mark’s face screws up, then he drums his hands a little on the wheel before him. “Good for you, dude. My dad, he...he put a lock on the outside of mine and my brother’s bedroom doors. He didn’t say it, but he was really worried about us going out on our own. I heard him one night talking to my mom after I learned how to jimmy the lock open, how he had no idea who or how many people would still be awake, scared that he couldn’t protect us.”

Dejun wrings his hands. “I’m sorry,” he offers, not knowing what else he can give.

Mark shrugs. “Donghyuck and I have done a little investigating and it’s no different than what a lot of families do, and statistically not like...necessary, apparently. Like I said, seven years and you’re all I’ve come across. And Donghyuck and I have been looking—with increasing intensity I guess.” The sun has come up fully now, shining off the windows of high-rises in the neighbourhood.

Dejun thinks. Thinks of seven years spent searching for life in the night. Life in the night beyond a single friend whom you are rapidly discovering was a fluke. Thinks of five years spent just accepting it, not thinking to fight it or change it or even simply know it.

He looks out the window, away from Mark and his grip on the wheel and his distant eyes. “You guys are smart.”

Mark snorts. “I don’t know about that. Like I said, I think I lucked out. Hyuckie and I just generate ideas when we get our heads together. Though, I’ll admit, it took us a while to think of this one.”

“You mean, like, driving around looking for people?” Dejun asks.

Adjusting his hands on the wheel, Mark nods. “Yeah. Originally we were just, you know. Wandering around our apartment complex, listening at doors to see if we could hear anything. Took us near enough a year to get through the whole building, including all the days where we just, kinda, like...wanted to fuck around, and whatever.”

Dejun has no idea if anyone else in his building sleeps or not.

“After we got through the building it kinda burnt us out, you know? We'd spent all that time and didn't find anyone. Felt like a waste. But Hyuck, he's...well, he's not the sort to, like. Take defeat lying down. So we moved out, we started looking around our new place...Then we jacked a couple of cars to widen our radius or whatever. And here we are."

"Here we are," mutters Dejun.

They drive in silence, and Dejun closes his eyes.

_He dreams of the future._

_There is no indication that it's the future; he does not see flying cars, there are no jetpacks, he has no neural implants nor are any holographic advertisements flashing before him. He has nothing in this dream to point to, beyond a vague, dreamstate understanding that this is not his present and not his past._

_He stands on that same building from the dreams that cause him such trepidation, at the precipice of the roof, staring into the open air ahead of him. He tenses in fear to hear the voices again, to hear them beg for his compliance in ways he's not sure he can manage. He shifts on his feet, a bird flits past him through the sun, and the wind curls through his hair._

_Arms wrap around his middle again, a breath at his ear, but this time the first voice is hollow. It echoes like it might be many voices all speaking at once from the same mouth, and it leaves him feeling cold. "Come, step away from the edge, my love," it coaxes. Fingers knead gently at his sides, his stomach, subtly hoping to move him backward before he’s offered his agreement._

_Then come the hands on his face. They burn still, but not painfully. The warmth eases something in him, comforts him to see reflected in the eyes that the hands belong to. "I will not let you fall, darling. Not alone, not in despair."_

_The voice is familiar. Not like he's known it forever, but like it has only recently come to mean something like safety, something like home._

_Dejun steps forward._

“Where are we headed?”

Mark hums, turning onto a nearly deserted expressway. No need for distant travel when you only have six hours to get where you’re going. “I just want to get us back to where Donghyuck and I were holed up. We both split up about a week and a half ago, went in opposite directions, and agreed we’d come back in like... a month or so. Or when we found someone. Whichever came first.”

“Shouldn’t we keep looking for others?” Dejun asks idly, watching scenery fly by.

“I...I don’t wanna push my luck. It feels like tempting fate just to have found you.”

Dejun snorts, turning back to find Mark looking surprisingly serious. “What do you think is gonna happen? You’re just gonna knock the fuck out, out of the blue?”

The joke doesn’t land, the silence in the car thick.

“You can’t be serious?”

Mark squints, looking at the road ahead of him diligently. “We have no idea how this sleep works, Dejun. Sure, it’s only affected the regular sleep cycle for the vast majority, and maybe that’s all it’ll ever do. But how can we possibly know that?”

A vision of his mother, falling to sleep like usual, but so much less fight in her against its pull. Dejun tilts his head back, looking at the black fabric roof of the car. “It’s killing people,” Dejun confesses, teetering on the edge of something. That dam within him creaks under the pressure again, drops spilling out and soaking his foothold on safe conversation. “Or, at the very least, it _can_ kill people,” he says by way of elaboration, and leaves it at that.

On the steering wheel, Mark’s arms tense, the muscles underneath his skin drawing corded from the force of his grip. “I knew it...” he mutters.

“I...” Dejun starts, the day his mother passed on the tip of his tongue to share, but... “I’m sorry. I don’t know the details but. I’ve seen it happen.”

Mark nods, then pulls out his phone. The bluetooth signal chimes through the radio, and Mark scrolls through his phone without looking away from the road ahead of him. It must be to find his music player, as music begins to filter through the speakers and Mark tosses his phone in the cupholder. A few presses of the buttons on the steering wheel, and the volume is at a comfortable enough level, but it definitely leaves no room for discussion. Dejun takes the hint, reclining his seat and facing the passenger door.

They drive through the waking hours and into the night. They stop at a gas station only once as everyone is preparing for sleep, and Mark expertly dodges questions about where he’s headed and why they’re stocking up on food and drink. Dejun thinks of the uncle at the convenience store down the block from his apartment complex, of all the afternoons he’s been the first one to show up at the doors and greet him for the day. The man had not once asked Dejun about it. He’d given Dejun free reign of the chocolate bars after Dejun had cried in front of the milk fridge, unable to remember what percentage his mother had bought for coffee and other things, and no longer being able to ask her.

He wonders just how much luck has been on his side in his life, that he hasn’t had to cultivate skills like Mark’s.

In the dark of night, they pull onto the deserted campus of a university. Higher education took a backseat to caring for the family when the sleep took the masses, post-secondary schools having closed ages ago as their learned minds were called to greater work in researching the phenomenon, or else prioritised other endeavours of their own. Mark drives brazenly over curbs and quads, pulling directly in front of what looks to be a student apartment. Looking closely, Dejun can see the locks have been absolutely destroyed, and one of the doors looks like it might be slightly ajar.

“No need to worry about looking suspicious if there’s no one around to call attention to your behaviour,” Mark says, by way of explanation to Dejun’s unasked question, and exits the car toward the building.

“Mm,” Dejun agrees idly, looking around. The empty campus is almost disconcerting. He’d never been to a university when they were populated, but it still feels wrong that such a sprawling locale built to hold so many should be quite so silent. “Have people like...given you cause to be worried?”

Mark shrugs and shoulders a door open. “I mean, not really. Law enforcement doesn’t exist when people are asleep, because there’s, like...a fraction of a fraction of a percentage of people that are still awake. But still. I don’t want people to, like...I don’t know, target us. Maybe eliminate us as outliers or a potential for danger when they’re sleeping. Better safe than sorry.”

Dejun nods, following Mark up the stairs to the second floor apartment. This door has a proper lock on it, and Mark pulls out a ring of keys to open it. 

“You can take Donghyuck’s room until he gets back,” Mark offers, beckoning for Dejun to follow him. “We have like, a stockpile of clothes we’ve nabbed from various places, so if you want to take some or change or whatever, you’re golden. Water’s been shut off to the place so no showering, but there’s a public pool nearby with maintained showers and bathrooms that we use while the world sleeps, and that gets the job done. I figure we can hang around here until Donghyuck comes back, then we can see about getting you set up in the downstairs apartment or something—but no sense in doing that now, seems a bit lonely if you ask me.”

He follows Mark down the halls, and Mark gestures to two doors. “Left side is Hyuckie’s. Right one’s mine. I don’t know what kind of mess he left before we headed out, but I want you to know I didn’t raise him like that.”

In between the doors, Mark stands with his hands on his hips, and turns around. The lights are off, it’s dark as sin, and only the orange glow of the incandescent street lights pour in from the windows to paint Mark in stark shadows. Dejun is rooted to the spot. Somehow, something about the hour has made the past day slam into him with force. His hands shake and his chest constricts like someone’s decided to reach into his ribs and hold his lungs hostage. “Dejun?” Mark asks, careful, his hands dropping from his sides to reach out hesitantly.

The tears terrify him with how forceful they are. When he thought he’d lost the only other fully wakeful person he’d ever seen in his life, the tears had felt more like a side effect, something extraneous and prompted by nothing more than sheer desolation. These were sobs that wracked his whole body and sent him quaking into the wall.

“Jesus,” he hears Mark curse over the sound of static in his ears and in his mind, as he reaches out to grasp Dejun by the shoulders. “Come on, dude, breathe. It’s okay, man, we’re fine! You’re safe, everything is alright.” His tone is less than totally reassuring, and Dejun feels bad for him in some cordoned off corner of his brain where he’s not having a whole breakdown. “Here, here,” Mark coaxes, and leads them beyond the door to the right, into Mark’s own room, littered with clothes and a guitar, a wireless speaker, and a laptop thrown on a utilitarian university-issue desk. He sits Dejun down on the bed. “You’re fine, Dejun. I’m right here, I’m not a dream,” Mark mutters, getting more confident, as he bends down and pulls off Dejun’s shoes.

Dejun, for his part, takes the opportunity to bend himself in half and wail into his thighs. Mark flinches only slightly at the sound of it, which Dejun ought to remember to congratulate him for when his head comes back to him. But right now, in this moment, Dejun sobs in a way he hasn’t since his mother, bowled over by some unknowable _something_ that his heart is filled with, having been found by Mark like he has.

Mark stands up fully, and Dejun feels arms encircle his head where it’s hanging, feels gentle hands press his head into a soft stomach. “Get it all out, man,” Mark urges quietly, and his fingers start carding through Dejun’s hair. “That’s the way, dude. Come on, I know you have one more good scream in there.”

The next sob comes out like a weak whine, which is near enough to the pained chuckle Dejun was aiming for. The tears don’t stop, but their urgency does. Dejun reaches up to curl his fingers into Mark’s shirt, digging the crown of his head further into Mark’s stomach. He’s down to whimpers now.

“Okay, okay. Stand up, dude, get your pants off. You’re sleeping in here with me tonight, and I refuse for us to be awkward about it.” Mark helps him stand up, and Dejun doesn’t have the emotional wherewithal to question him. He’s in his boxers and a t-shirt, Mark in his own boxer-briefs and a thermal, and Mark’s crawling under his covers and holding them up invitingly. “Get in here. I’m not letting you wake up thinking you’re alone again.”

Still whimpering and sniffling, Dejun feels no compunction in knee-walking into the middle of the bed, pulling the covers over himself, and falling into the open curve of Mark’s arms. He rests his cheek against Mark’s chest, and let’s Mark soothe him with gentle squeezes and stroking of his back.

_“Mama?” Dejun asks, having tucked his teddy bear into bed to sleep without him._

_“Yes,_ baobao _?” Mama responds, and Mama is also getting ready to sleep without him. The sun is low in the sky, and if he stands on tiptoes to see over the edge of the stovetop to look at the clock, he can see that the time starts with the number 5, and that means that Mama will be asleep very soon._

_“Mama, do you dream when you’re sleeping?”_

_Mama’s eyes are bleary, and Dejun knows that it being so close to the clock starting with the number 6 means that Mama doesn’t think very well right now, so he hopes she can answer his question without thinking too hard._

_“Come here, A-jun. Crawl in with Mama.”_

_Dejun crawls in with Mama. When he was much younger, Mama always had him crawl in with her during her brief hours of sleep, and told him to stay only in her bedroom until she woke up. Now that he is older and Mama sleeps longer but has taught him things like how to use the cellphone and how to do the stitching on his teddy bear, he is allowed to crawl out of bed when he’s ready._

_“No,” Mama says, “I don’t dream. Not anymore. The sleep that I sleep now is much different from what it used to be, from what yours is now. Yours is restful, is healing. Mine is...Mine is a void.”_

_“What’s void, Mama?”_

_“It means that even if there was something, if there was even the possibility of something, it is eaten up before it has a chance. It simply cannot exist.”_

_“Why is it so hungry?”_

_Mama is lying down, and her eyes can’t stay open. “I don’t know,_ baobei _. But I must be delicious.”_

It’s maybe an hour like that, just easing out of such intense emotion and panic, that Dejun tries to push away. Mark just squeezes him closer. “Nope, we’re in this now, dude. No escape.” There’s a beat, then Mark’s arms go limp. “Wait, hold up. I mean—sorry, no, like. You can escape if you really want, I’m sorry, but if. You know, if this is helping, please stay and let it keep doing that.”

Dejun chuckles wetly, and gives up on peeling himself out of Mark’s grasp. “Used to this with Donghyuck or whatever?”

Mark snorts. “More like I’ve learned from him doing this to me. I’m a huge baby.”

“Kinda weird to do with a dude you’ve known for less than twenty-four hours, I have to say.”

There’s a soft smack to his back, and Dejun feels himself giggle at the impact. “Stop. I said we weren’t allowed to be awkward about this, dude, I meant that shit. Bros can cuddle, it’s fine, that’s why we have a word for it.”

Quiet settles around them with the dark of the night. Dejun feels himself dozing, with one of Mark’s hands running through his hair again. “You wanna talk about it?” he asks, quietly, enough that if Dejun had actually been sleeping he could have played it off.

Dejun wasn’t sleeping though. “I don’t know. I don’t know that there actually is anything to talk about. I was fine, things were fine, and then I thought about sleeping on my own in a new place for the first time without my mother and I. I guess it choked me. The loneliness of what my life was.”

“She’s the one who the sleep took,” Mark asks in a tone that implies he’s really just looking for confirmation.

Against Mark’s chest, Dejun nods. “It was just us for a long time. I don’t remember having a dad, and I didn’t really ever want one. She was my world, and I was hers, and that was fine. I noticed she was sleeping longer, but what could I do? You know how it is.” Dejun thinks of afternoons, well past noon, desperately shaking his mother hoping to jostle her awake. He thinks of his increasingly harebrained attempts to wake her, and all the ways they went wrong; poking her with sewing needles, sticking her hands in hot water. How angry she got when she would finally wake up for the day and be startled to find her fingers with pearls of blood, or the skin of her hands so nearly burned. How scared she got when she realized she hadn’t had a clue while she slept what he had done. “There was no waking her.”

Mark’s hands resume their soothing movements, and the lack of eye contact and pressure makes it easier for Dejun to talk about what he hasn’t since. “I think...she knew?” he says, rolling the idea around on his tongue like he hasn’t been rolling it over his mind for years. That his mother knew all along that that sleep was going to be her end. “From the time I can remember, she taught me essentials. I went to the lessons with the neighbourhood kids, but when I got home she would give me her own kind of homework. For when she was asleep. Stitch your teddy back up, don’t prick your fingers, cook some scrambled eggs like I showed you this morning, wrap up the burn you got carefully, all sorts of stuff.”

“She sounds like she really wanted you to survive.”

The tears come again, but Dejun doesn’t feel as overwhelmed as before. “Yeah. She’d say that before she went to sleep.” Her voice still rings in his head. _I love you,_ baobei _, be safe, survive for me._

Mark squeezes him tighter, and Dejun feels his chin hook over the crown of his head. A shift, lips to his hair, chin settled back over his head. “And you did. Good work.”

Dejun lets himself luxuriate in the circle of Mark’s arms. He breathes in deeply, feels Mark’s lungs echo the motion and return it, takes quiet solace in another person. The window in Mark’s room lets that same amber-yellow incandescent street light into the room, casting strange shadows when Dejun lifts himself up over Mark’s reclined form. The darkness cuts Mark’s face in geometric shapes from the cut of his cheekbones, that same almost-golden brown of his eyes seeming deeper and darker in the night.

It’s a whim, probably endorphins from skin-to-skin contact after so long without it. Maybe it’s a byproduct of sharing a piece of himself that’s never seen the light of day, maybe he’s just tired of crying on this boy that scooped him out of isolation and offered him something close to hope. But Dejun leans down and nudges Mark’s nose aside with his own, teasing his mouth open with a hitched breath dripping in the air between their lips, and he kisses him.

Mark’s hand had fallen out of his hair when Dejun lifted himself up, but it comes back now with an eagerness, clutching close and grasping. The press of their lips together is a slow movement, until Mark shifts and surges up and invites himself into Dejun’s mouth through his responding gasp.

Dejun presses Mark back down against his pillows, sucking lightly on his tongue and roaming hands across the expanse of his chest. A shift, and Mark has a knee bent behind Dejun so that there is, briefly, pressure against his dick, and Dejun gasps again, earning a smile and grazing teeth on his lower lip.

It’s furious, the way this hunger eats him up so suddenly, like the panic before it, the sadness and desperation. Dejun is sitting back, pulling his shirt off over his head, and Mark wriggles to do the same, before he pushes himself up and forward to catch Dejun in a kiss again, this one needier and louder than the last. Mark is groaning into his mouth and Dejun reaches down the muscles of Mark’s back to grab the pert roundness of his ass against the mattress and hold it so he can grind his dick down against Mark’s own.

“I—” Dejun starts, closing his eyes and pressing his forehead to Mark’s, who heaves the same heavy breaths as Dejun himself, their noses brushing in the heat of their exhalations. “I’m sorry, but I...I’m really not. I need—”

Mark shakes his head, leaning up to kiss Dejun once, twice. “Stop. I am, Christ, I am more than okay with this. This is—this is extremely okay, dude—”

Dejun cups Mark by the jaw and kisses him with a surge, nearly knocking them both off balance. “Don’t. Call me ‘dude’. When your hard-on is against mine.”

The way Mark laughs into Dejun’s mouth burrows itself into the back of his brain like some half-way welcome rodent smelling the pantry, and he echoes it with a chuckle of his own as he bites his way back between Mark’s lips. “It’s—” Mark tries, interrupting himself to pull Dejun down and closer to him, kissing him again and again despite clearly also wanting to say something. “It’s gonna, um, have to be—fuck, Jesus, Dejun, shit—gonna have to be quick and—” Mark heaves a breath as he props himself up with one hand, using the other on Dejun’s hip to guide their clothed erections to press together. “—quick and dirty, here. I don’t—it’s just me and Hyuck and I—”

Dejun eases back onto his haunches, hooking both thumbs into the elastic of his boxers to hook them down and under his ass and his cock, then spits hastily into his hand. He fists himself once, hissing and closing his eyes from the friction, biting his lip to the sound of Mark gasping out a soft “fuck” in front of him. “Quick and dirty, then,” Dejun confirms, and pumps his cock once more, this time looking Mark in his eyes.

“God, you—” Mark bites out, but he’s shifting on his ass to pull his boxer-briefs down, pulling his cock out with a dry hand. With the other, he grabs Dejun’s neck and pulls him back down, sealing their lips together again.

Mark’s not small, and really neither is Dejun, but Dejun presses his palm to Mark’s in a handshake to share the glide of saliva, and then guides their hands to where their dicks slide together in leaking precome.

Dejun fucks his hips up into their shared grasp, his other hand cupped around Mark’s ear, fingers scratching through the shorn edges of his hairline at the base of his neck. Mark shivers and bucks his hips back.

Quick and dirty is the word for it. After finding their rhythm, it’s nothing but their mingled breaths between them, too far gone for kissing anymore. Still, Dejun nudges around Mark’s face with his nose, laying open-mouthed kisses on his cheekbones, his jawline, pulling his earlobe into his mouth. At some point, Mark falls backward against the pillows, pulling Dejun down over him and kicking his knees up for leverage, fucking up into his and Dejun’s hands off the mattress, his eyes screwed shut.

“Hh, close,” Mark grunts, the hand not fisting their cocks guiding Dejun’s hips down smoothly to find that final friction. “I’m close, fuck, Dejun—”

Dejun pulls himself up to spit into his hand again, pressing their cocks together and bearing down over Mark to put his leverage to use. He searches blindly, blearily, for Mark’s lips, and feels Mark doing the same, their noses knocking and missing as they slot their mouths together.

Underneath him, Mark shudders and locks up, his dick pulsing as Dejun rocks himself against the crook of Mark’s hip and thigh, closing his hand around Mark alone to pump him through his climax, drinking down Mark’s whiny groans like water.

Once Mark goes boneless, he knocks Dejun’s hands away, pulling them up and toward the pillows so that Dejun is resting on his elbows, bracketing Mark’s head. He takes Dejun in hand, twisting his hand and circling the head with his palm, and Dejun moans open against Mark’s lips, coming on Mark’s painted chest. He props himself up there for as long as his trembling arms will let him, heaving with his forehead resting against Mark’s, before pitching to the side to avoid the mess they’ve made.

He reaches blindly over the edge of the bed for his shirt, and rubs off what he can on Mark’s chest. Mark heaves out an exhausted “Thanks,” on an exhale, and Dejun throws the shirt back onto the floor. Night hangs silent around them but for the two of them catching their breath. Dejun pulls his boxers back up, tucks himself back in, and stares at Mark’s ceiling.

Mark shifts. “Okay, I’d actually really like for my request that we not feel awkward about this extend also to this particular afterglow,” he says, and Dejun watches from his periphery as Mark reaches a hand up to run fingers through his sweaty fringe.

Dejun laughs, rolling onto his side. “Sorry,” he tries, messing with the edge of Mark’s pillowcase.

“For what?”

“I don’t know,” Dejun shrugs, looking when Mark rolls to his side as well, tucking himself closer to the bracket of Dejun’s body. “For like, dumping my trauma on you and then turning it into a lightning round fuck?”

Mark reaches out and grazes his fingers over the air above Dejun’s cheek. “Can I kiss you again?”

“Yeah,” Dejun whispers, wrapping an arm around Mark’s waist as Mark cups the back of his neck. His lips are pliant—plush even—and Dejun lets Mark take his time, feeling something in his chest ease.

When Mark pulls away, it’s with a few absent kisses to Dejun’s nose and cheeks. “Full disclosure, man, my first thought when I saw you in front of your apartment this morning was not ‘Oh thank god, another soul,’ but was, in fact, ‘I wonder if he’d let me suck his dick,’ so I can assure you it was not a one-sided turn into fucking.”

“Oh good,” Dejun says on a laugh.

Mark presses their foreheads together once more, his eyes closed, and Dejun follows suit.

“What do we do,” Dejun whispers into the darkness behind his eyelids, “after Donghyuck comes back?”

Mark shakes his head. “I don’t know, really. Hyuck and I we’ve...We’ve been working on the thought of finding others for so long, I don’t know that we’ve ever really thought about what to do after we found someone.”

Winding his arms around Mark tighter, Dejun lets himself delight in the contact, in the strange reliability of this boy he’s known for less than a day. “I think...I think we keep looking. Keep looking, keep finding others who are resistant to whatever the sleep is. We gather us all up, and we...I don’t know, see if there’s a pattern that becomes apparent?”

Mark’s breathing is evening out. “That’s really smart. I like that.”

Sleep finds them, and Dejun drifts off to the sound of another set of lungs working for the first time in years.

_He dreams of his mother only rarely._

_Sometimes it’s a memory on repeat, a moment with her frozen in his mind that he can recall when he wakes. He knows every move, can remember every line, and he dances with her in the kitchen and lies beside her as she falls asleep, and cries in her arms while she bandages some scrape or other he got._

_Others, she is a harbinger. She stands at the edges of his vision, a spectre of the sleep that drew her too close. He feels a lingering unease when she appears to him like this, a sense that if he were to get too close, she would reveal herself to not be his mother at all, just some figment that took her form and her face to test his resolve._

_This time...she is neither of these._ “Baobei,” _she says with a sweet smile._

_“Mama,” he answers._

_They sit at a table, and she pours him tea, and he can recall nothing of the room even as he sits in it. It exists in a way that scrubs itself from his memory even as he commits it._

_“You are my pride, A-jun. I was, am, and will continue to be so proud of you, Xiao Dejun.”_

_“I live for you,” he says._

_But she shakes her head. “No, my darling son. You live for you. Your life was never mine, but always yours to hold in your hands. Do not take your life, but live it. Be_ alive _, Dejun.”_

_“Alive,” he echoes, and he wakes._

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading.
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